Invasion

Captain Brent Roeder stepped into the briefing room and caught the Colonel’s eye. The Colonel had commanded SF34 for the past two years, although – unlike Brent himself – he hadn’t actually been on a mission for a while. The SF unit only accepted experienced officers, those who had seen the elephant and knew that there were times for breaking rules, but someone so senior could hardly be risked in Iraq, Afghanistan and a number of places where everyone would be surprised to learn that American soldiers had served. A month ago, Brent had been in Northern Pakistan, hunting the Taliban and the terrorist leadership hiding somewhere within the badlands. The recall to duty, two weeks ahead of his planned return time, had been a surprise.

“Now we’re all here, we can begin,” the Colonel said. Informality was the order of the day in SF34. The Colonel wouldn’t put up with any horseplay or the jokes that idle soldiers would sometimes play on each other, but he would allow a level of free discussion that would have been out of place in most units. “There has been a surprising development and we have been placed on alert to cope with it.”

Brent found himself leaning forward eagerly and pulled himself back. The grapevine had been suggesting, for the past week or so, that the Iranians had finally been caught with their fingers in the till…or, rather, accepting money from terrorists to host bases in their territory, safe from conventional attack. Brent and the remainder of SF34 represented a more serious – and unconventional – response to their actions. It wouldn’t be the first time that they had raided a friendly country, or at least a country that they were not officially at war with, aiming to burn out the terrorists.

The Colonel’s next words shocked hell out of him. “NASA has detected an alien starship heading for Earth,” he said, shortly. “I have been given a classified brief – an extremely classified brief – that we are going to be going on full alert for their arrival. God alone knows how the world will change – hell, God alone knows if they are hostile or not – but if there is an invasion on the way, we’re going to be ready.”

Brent stared at him. He’d been told, months ago, that they would be conducting a secret mission in Germany…and he’d taken that calmly. He’d hiked over Saudi Arabia in local clothing and he’d taken that in his stride, but…aliens? Cold suspicion flared through his mind; it wasn’t unknown for the Special Forces to be tested to see how far they would go, a procedure intended to guard against the possibility of a rogue unit blindly following orders that ended with the assassination of the President or something along the same lines. Aliens were a little unusual for such a test run, but maybe…

One of the other officers put it into words. “Sir…aliens?”

“I’m afraid so,” the Colonel said. “This isn’t a drill. Ideally, you won’t have anything to do and all of these are just precautions, but if you have to act as stay-behind units, you’re going to find yourselves in the rear lines.”

There were some nervous chuckles. SF34 had been tasked as a stay-behind unit, but it had been generally accepted that they wouldn’t be staying behind in their own country; after all, America was generally impregnable. The war-gamers came up with endless contingency plans, but barring a Mexican invasion or a major civil upheaval, no one seriously expected to be operating behind enemy lines, on American soil. The closest any of them had come to such operations had been special – and highly classified – operations in Iraq. Aliens, on the other hand, might actually be able to invade America directly, something that no nation possessed the power to do.

“Hopefully,” the Colonel continued, once he had fielded a handful more questions, “you won’t have anything to do. However, you will spend the rest of this week working on covert operations procedures in the event of America falling under enemy attack.”

“Madness,” Brent said, shaking his head. “Are you sure it’s not a drill?”

Another soldier had a different question. “When is the President going to tell the nation?”

“We suspect in a few days at most,” the Colonel said. “We want to get as many of the preparations completed, out of the public eye, as possible before it hits the news channels. Once it does, there is going to be a panic, and when that happens…”

He didn’t bother to elaborate. “I’ll hold individual conferences with you over the next few days to sort out final preparations,” he concluded. “If nothing else, this will make for a particularly interesting exercise.”

***

“The shit’s about to hit the fan,” Deborah Ivey said, cheerfully, as she swept into the Oval Office. “We’ve had calls from a dozen major media outlets and other such bastards demanding to know just what the fuck is going on. I think we’re going to have to come clean about the aliens, chief.”